The problem of 'brand' facing the platform providers in the age of AI


It is easy to forecast that the majority of use a particular platform provider (Gmail, Slack, etc) will face in the next few years will be from non-UI-using AI agents.


AI agents will open up (say) Gmail using OAuth, fiddle around reading/writing emails, changing settings, etc etc... all without using the traditional UI. So Gmail itself will become more of a process of AI, rather than a standalone application in its own right. In fact it's worse; once you've got 10,000 agents making autonomous decisions across your platform, you don't have a brand problem, you have a liability problem.


I anticipate that someone will create an API-only email provider (for example). They won't have to spend the lifetimes creating/testing the UI. They can pour all their resources into creating only the required domain functionality, knowing that AI will essentially be the UI.


This, of course, will destroy the brand which has required years/dollars$ to create and maintain. I can see these platform providers fighting back and either limiting the non-UI access, or banning it outright.


And yet the disintegration of the brand maybe even downstream of a bigger issue: many of these free platforms monetise UI eyeballs through ads. Agent traffic doesn’t see ads, or at least won't remember it. So the existential question is who pays for the compute when nobody’s looking at the UI anymore?


So I see this all coming to a nasty fight in the next few years. Any thoughts?

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